Article excerpt

The University of California Hastings College of the Law case, which the U.S. Supreme Court heard on April 19, has its share of absurdity, but what's missing is moral outrage.

The school denied recognition to a Christian Legal Society campus chapter because the group will not have atheists or homosexuals as officers. Yes, it's absurd on the face of it, like insisting that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals be forced to install meat-lovin' rocker Ted Nugent.

It's bad enough that a prestigious law school committed unconstitutional discrimination against a Christian club. It's even more unsettling that some Supreme Court justices can't fathom the difference between unalienable, constitutional rights and newly coined identity-based claims emanating from the infinitely expandable right to privacy. That's the one discovered in the birth-control cases, perfected in Roe v. Wade and elevated to cosmic heights in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which Justice Anthony Kennedy emoted that the meaning of the universe is the search for the meaning of the universe.

Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor showed why 31 senators voted against her. She opined that a college club that upholds rules about sexual morality and faith is, like, racist or sexist, man:

Are you suggesting that if a group wanted to exclude all black people, all women, all other forms of discrimination a group wants to practice, that a school has to accept that group and recognize it, give it funds, and otherwise lend it space?

Well, there goes the men's rugby team. And the campus NOW chapter. They'll be treated like the Boy Scouts, who are still victims of this kind of thinking, even after their Supreme Court victory in 2000.

Michael McConnell, representing the Christian Legal Society, argued that a group may discriminate on the basis of beliefs, not status. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. agreed, saying, Gender or race is fundamentally different from religious belief. Gender and race is a status. Religious belief has to be based on the fundamental notion that we are not open to everybody. We have beliefs; you have to subscribe to them. And we have always regarded that as a good thing. …

In a Big Shift, US Parents Tilt to Bush ; Clinton Scandals and Concern about Public Morality Count Heavily in Their ChoiceLinda Feldmann, writer of The Christian Science Monitor.
The Christian Science Monitor, April 3, 2000